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Every day, GenealogyBank is working hard to digitize more U.S. newspapers and obituaries, expanding our burgeoning collection to give you the largest newspaper archives for family history research available online from the 1600s up to today. We’ve just added 26 million more U.S. genealogy records, vastly increasing our news coverage from coast to coast!

Here are some of the details about our most recent U.S. newspaper additions:

A total of 49 newspaper titles from 19 U.S. states

21 of these titles are newspapers added to GenealogyBank for the first time

Newspaper titles marked with an asterisk (*)are new to our online archives

We’ve shown the newspaper issue date ranges so that you can determine if the newly added content is relevant to your personal genealogy research

You can either print or create a PDF version of this Blog post by simply clicking on the green “Print/PDF” button below. The PDF version makes it easy to save this post onto your desktop or portable device for quick reference—all the newspaper links will be live.

Long-established American families have family trees that stretch back to the Colonial Era in the 17th and 18th centuries, before the United States became an independent country. Finding vital statistics and other genealogical information about these early Colonial ancestors from that time period can be difficult, as some vital records simply were not officially kept before and during the 1700s, or have been destroyed through war, accident or the passage of time.

Illustration: 1754 political cartoon by Benjamin Franklin urging the British Colonies in North America to join together to help the British win the French and Indian War (the segment labeled “N.E.” stands for the four New England colonies). Credit: U.S. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Fortunately, GenealogyBank offers a rich genealogy resource for family historians tracing their family trees back to American Colonial times: an online collection of 27 Colonial newspapers, providing obituaries, birth notices, marriage announcements, and personal stories to get to know your pioneering ancestors and the times they lived in better.

Discover a variety of historical genealogy records and news stories in these 27 Colonial newspapers, listed alphabetically by state and then city. Each historical newspaper title in this list is an active link that will take you directly to that paper’s search page, where you can begin researching for your Colonial ancestry by ancestors’ surnames, dates, keywords and more.

Download our printable PDF list of Colonial newspapers for easy access to our historical archives right from your local desktop. Click the newspaper titles to be taken directly to the search landing page for that publication. Just click on the list below to start your download.

Feel free to embed our list of 1700s newspapers on your website or blog using the code below. Simply cut, paste and presto! You can easily share this fantastic collection for early American ancestry research with your visitors.

We are often asked if GenealogyBank includes newspapers published in other countries, such as Canada, various countries in Europe, or in the Americas. No, we don’t.

But, there is a bright side.

U.S. newspapers routinely published news of marriages and deaths from overseas that they felt were of high interest to their U.S.-based readers. These were selective, so look to see if there were any news articles that targeted your relatives.

Newport, Rhode Island, is a seaport town that had many people involved in the sea. Because of this maritime involvement, news from the Caribbean islands was of high interest to the readers of Rhode Island newspapers like the Newport Mercury. This obituary of Mrs. Margaret Pullen, who died at age 100 in Antigua, would have been of interest in the Newport, RI, area—not only for her longevity and good health, but also because she was from the Caribbean, and for her family’s support of Queen Anne (1665-1714) who had been popular in the colonies.

Here is another obituary from the island of Antigua that was published in a U.S. newspaper.

Maryland Journal (Baltimore, Maryland), 25 April 1788, page 2

James Hutchison died 28 February 1788 a wealthy man. The obituary mentions that his sister Margaret of Paisley, Scotland, is the sole executrix of his will.

Publishing genealogy records from overseas is also common with ethnic U.S. newspapers like the Irish American Weekly (New York City, New York).

Collage of marriage and death notices from Irish American newspapers

The Irish American Weekly routinely published news of marriages and deaths from back in Ireland. Did it capture every Irish marriage? No—but it did publish tens of thousands of Irish marriage announcements and death notices. It is essential that you look there and in the other Irish American newspapers in our online archives to discover the marriage and death records of your Irish ancestors.

There is also a wealth of genealogical material to research your Hispanic ancestry in our Hispanic American newspapers. Dig in and trace your family tree around the world now!

OK. So he was a captain, and his first name was Sargent. Given his age (dying at 78 in 1818), he was most probably a captain in the Revolutionary War. Let’s see what GenealogyBank can tell us about his military service.

Thirtieth Report of the National Society of the Daughters of the American Resolution. March 1, 1926, to March 1, 1927. December 17, 1927. Serial Set Volume No. 8848; Report: Senate Document 48. Page 128.

Great genealogical find. This report tells us that Huse was born in 1740, died 26 January 1818, and was buried in the Town Cemetery in Greenland, New Hampshire. This old government record further tells us that he:

Signed [the] Association Test in Epping, New Hampshire

Was a lieutenant in Capt. Nathan Brown’s company in the Revolutionary War

Was in Col. Jacob Gale’s Regiment in Rhode Island, August 1778

This old death notice confirms that the Revolutionary War soldier Huse died in Greenland, New Hampshire, and tells us that he was an “eminent” innkeeper.

Concord Gazette (Concord, New Hampshire), 17 February 1818, page 3

By April 1818 proceedings were underway to probate his estate. His widow, Huldah Huse, placed a legal notice in the newspaper alerting all creditors and those owing money to the late Sargent Huse that notice and payments were now due.

By March of 1842 her home, “as pleasant if not the pleasantest there is in Greenland” was for sale—including the house, stable, a “never failing well of the best of water, and also an orchard of the best of grafted fruit, with about five acres of land.”

These brief lines in this old estate record give us a sense of the home Captain Sargent and Huldah Huse made for themselves—where they had lived, their industry, and their success.

The historical newspapers and U.S. government documents in GenealogyBank give us more of the story of our Revolutionary War ancestors’ lives—as well as an occasional chuckle, such as when we see this ad copy written to spin the best talking points of a property for sale!

In celebration of Irish Heritage Month, here are some interesting facts about Irish ancestry in America.

Irish American Population Statistics

There are 34.5 million people who claim Irish ancestry in America

Approximately 11% of the total United States population is Irish American

There are over 7 times more people of Irish descent in the United States than the entire population of Ireland

History of Irish Immigration to America

There were 2 major waves of Irish immigration to America.

The first immigration period was in the Colonial era of the 18th century. These people set sail from the northern provinces of Ireland looking for new lives as American pioneers. The migration consisted of approximately 250,000 Scots-Irish who were predominately Protestant. The major ports of entry for these incoming Irish immigrants were in New York and Philadelphia.

The second wave of immigration was between 1846 and 1900. During this period approximately 2,873,000 people fled to America from the southern provinces of Ireland. This was primarily due to the Great Irish Potato Famine, which caused poverty and starvation throughout Ireland. These new arrivals were predominately of Catholic denomination. The major American ports of entry were in New York and Boston. The Irish also arrived on trains and ships from Canada, which was then called British North America.

Origins of the Saying “Luck of the Irish”

During the 1848-1855 California Gold Rush many Irish immigrants headed out West to mine silver & gold. Many Americans said the immigrants’ mining success was due to luck, not skill—hence the saying “Luck of the Irish.”

Common Irish Surnames

Here is a list of the top 10 most common Irish last names and their meanings:

Murphy – Sea Battlers

Kelly – Bright-headed Ones

O’Sullivan – Hawkeyed Ones

Walsh – Welshmen

O’Brien – Noblemen

Byrne – Ravens

Ryan – Little Kings

O’Connor – Patrons of Warriors

O’Neill - From a Champion, Niall of the Nine Hostages

O’Reilly – Outgoing People, Descendants of Reilly

Percentage of Irish Americans by State

The Northeastern United States has the highest concentration of Irish Americans. The following 9 states all have more than 15% Irish ancestry in their total populations. The states are listed in descending order from highest to lowest total Irish population percentages. Massachusetts has the highest percentage in the United States with 22.5% of its residents claiming Irish ancestry.

Massachusetts

New Hampshire

Rhode Island

Delaware

Connecticut

Vermont

Pennsylvania

New Jersey

Maine

The following 9 U.S. states also have high Irish American populations of 12-14%. Montana has the highest in this range with 14.8% of its population claiming Irish ancestry.

Montana

Iowa

Nebraska

Wyoming

New York

Missouri

Ohio

Colorado

Illinois

11% to 11.9% of the residents in the following 7 states claim Irish ancestry.

Oregon

Maryland

Kansas

Washington

Minnesota

Nevada

West Virginia

The remaining states have less than 11% Irish ancestry in their total populations.

Famous Americans Who Are a Wee Bit Irish

From presidents to outlaws, there have been many famous Irish Americans throughout U.S. history. Here are a few of them:

Civil registration in Ireland didn’t begin until 1864, although some non-Catholic marriages were recorded as early as 1845. Fortunately for genealogists, Irish American newspapers routinely published the news of Irish births, marriages and deaths for more than half a century before Ireland started recording them.

Every day we add more newspapers to GenealogyBank’s online newspaper archives, updating our coverage for more than 3,000 newspapers.

Rain, snow, it doesn’t matter—we digitize and post daily papers published today across America, as well as newspapers published 300 years ago. Millions of records are added every month to our archives.

We add new titles and expand the date ranges of newspapers already in our collection.

When we add a back run of a newspaper we may not yet have tracked down every issue ever published by that newspaper. However, we digitize and put online all the issues we can find, while continuing to track back issues with the goal of someday getting every possible issue online.

Here is just a partial list of what we have been working on in the past few weeks. I think it will give you a sense of the enormous scale of the service that GenealogyBank is bringing to genealogists online. Notice that we found one more issue of the Augusta Chronicle (Augusta, Georgia) and over 1,500 issues of the American & Commercial Daily Advertiser (Baltimore, Maryland): as we find back issues we digitize and index them, then put them online.

GenealogyBank has added the backfiles of more than 100 newspapers from 28 U.S. states! This is great news for genealogists—so start searching now.

Every day we work to fill in missing issues in our newspaper archives of more than 6,100 titles so that you can do deeper genealogy research. Thousands of newspaper pages were added in this latest addition, totaling more than 25 million articles to help you fill in the gaps on your family tree.

Five newspapers (marked with an asterisk in the table below) are titles new to GenealogyBank.

These new titles include one newspaper from Florida and four from Georgia:

Plant City Observer (Plant City, Florida)

Fayette Chronicle (Fayetteville, Georgia)

Fayette County News (Fayette, Georgia)

Today in Peachtree City (Fayetteville, Georgia)

East Coweta Journal (Senoia, Georgia)

Here is the complete list of our latest newspaper additions. Each title is an interactive link taking you directly to that newspaper’s search form.

GenealogyBank is rapidly growing—we now have over 40 Rhode Island newspapers online for you to trace your genealogy. That’s a lot of local RI papers!

Search for your ancestors in multiple newspaper titles from Providence, Newport and other popular cities in Rhode Island. Here is the complete list of RI newspapers currently available in our archives. Bookmark this list of Rhode Island newspapers that is frequently updated to stay abreast of newly added titles.

Every day, GenealogyBank is working hard to digitize more newspapers and obituaries, expanding our collection to give you the largest newspaper archives for family history research available online. We just completed adding 24 million more U.S. genealogy records, vastly increasing our content coverage from coast to coast!

Here are some of the details about our most recent U.S. newspaper additions (we actually added new content to thousands of newspaper titles, but the following is a representative sample):

A total of 152 newspaper titles from 42 U.S. states and the District of Columbia

Newspaper titles marked with an asterisk (*) are new to our online archive

We’ve shown the newspaper issue date ranges so that you can determine if the newly added content is relevant to your personal genealogy research

If a recent addition to our archive interests you, simply click on that newspaper’s title: it is an active link leading to that paper’s search form on GenealogyBank.

Every day, GenealogyBank is working hard to digitize more newspapers and obituaries, expanding our online collection to give you the largest newspaper archives for family history research available anywhere.

Here are some details about our most recent additions (we actually added new content to thousands of titles, but the following is a representative sample):

A total of 99 newspaper titles from 29 U.S. states plus the District of Columbia

Titles marked with an asterisk (*) are obituaries only and are new to our archive

Those marked with a plus sign (+) are historical newspapers new to our archive

We’ve shown the date ranges so that you can determine if the new content is relevant to your personal research

If a recent addition to our archive interests you, simply click on that newspaper’s title: it is an active link leading to that paper’s search form.